Introduction

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT review is here! It’s been a while since the 2019 launch of the “Navi” Radeon RX 5700 RDNA series, which disrupted NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20-series performance segment line. That forced them to the RTX 20-series SUPER Series, but NVIDIA still had a huge lead in performance and efficiency. AMD has been working on the new RDNA2 architecture not only to power its next-generation Radeon GPUs, but also next-generation consoles such as the PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. This is what makes RDNA2 very relevant to game engine developers, as modern games are developed for consoles first, because that’s where the money is. Having the same architecture on both console and PC, will mean it’s easier to optimize for the latter, with minimal effort. The Radeon RX 6800 series is AMD’s first discrete GPU to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate requirements, which includes raytracing and variable-rate shading.

NVIDIA more than doubled the shader counts of its GeForce “Ampere” GPUs over the previous generation, since it wanted to make “RTX on” frame-rates roughly match the “RTX off” frame-rates of “Turing.” It was also expected for AMD to double the shader counts for “Big Navi” over the RX 5700, since this is AMD’s first Radeon to feature real-time raytracing, and double AMD did. When we started watching AMD’s announcement live-stream late-October for the new RX 6000 series, having reviewed the RTX 3080, little did we expect that AMD would launch a “high-end” GPU. What unraveled in the stream was jaw-dropping, with AMD claiming its RX 6000 series chips to go up against NVIDIA’s fastest, and being competitively priced to them. The Radeon RX 6800 XT in this review, was being compared to the RTX 3080, and the RX 6800 (also being reviewed today), going up against the RTX 2080 Ti (essentially the RTX 3070). The flagship RX 6900 XT is purported to compete with the RTX 3090, it will launch later this year. We would have called BS on these straight away, if AMD hadn’t priced these cards well upward of $500, meaning AMD is confident about the performance of these cards enough to give them a heavy price-tag, in NVIDIA’s league.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT, along with the RX 6800, are based on the 7 nm “Navi 21” RDNA2 silicon, with an 80% increase in compute units over the RX 5700 XT. Each of these RDNA2 compute units has raytracing hardware. AMD also doubled the memory amount to 16 GB, although the memory bus is still 256-bit, and the company is using JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps GDDR6 (512 GB/s). Shouldn’t that starve the silicon of memory bandwidth? AMD could have sought out broader memory buses, or even taken the HBM-MCM route, which would have hit the company’s price-cutting headroom against NVIDIA, but the company changed tactics by introducing a clever new component called Infinity Cache, which we’ll talk more about on the Architecture page. AMD is offering the Radeon RX 6800 XT at $649, or $50 cheaper than the RTX 3080. AMD is marketing the RX 6800 XT as the card to buy for maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD resolution—the same use-case the RTX 3080 is meant for. In this review, we put the Radeon RX 6800 XT through its paces to test all of AMD’s performance claims to tell you if AMD is back in the high-end game.